Again, he was beyond all reason.
Extravagantly mad, he built roaring fires in his sitting-room, drenching the leaping fire with a can of oil; spitting exultantly into the answering roar, and striking up, until he was exhausted, a profane chant, set to a few recurrent bars of music, which ran, for forty minutes, somewhat like this:
“O-ho — Goddam,
Goddam, Goddam,
O-ho — Goddam,
Goddam — Goddam.”
— adopting usually the measure by which clock-chimes strike out the hour.
And outside, strung like apes along the wide wires of the fence, Sandy and Fergus Duncan, Seth Tarkinton, sometimes Ben and Grover themselves, joining in the glee of their friends, kept up an answering chant:
“Old man Gant
Came home drunk!
Old man Gant
Came home drunk!”
Daisy, from a neighbor’s sanctuary, wept in shame and fear.
But Helen, small thin fury, held on relentlessly: presently he would subside into a chair, and receive hot soup and stinging slaps with a grin.
Upstairs Eliza lay, white-faced and watchfully.
So ran the summer by.
The last grapes hung in dried and rotten clusters to the vines; the wind roared distantly; September ended.
One night the dry doctor, Cardiac, said:
“I think we’ll be through with this before tomorrow evening.”
He departed, leaving in the house a middle-aged country woman.
She was a hard-handed practical nurse.
At eight o’clock Gant returned alone.
The boy Steve had stayed at home for ready dispatch at Eliza’s need; for the moment the attention was shifted from the master.
His great voice below, chanting obscenities, carried across the neighborhood: as she heard the sudden wild roar of flame up the chimney, shaking the house in its flight, she called Steve to her side, tensely:
“Son, he’ll burn us all up!” she whispered.
They heard a chair fall heavily below, his curse; they heard his heavy reeling stride across the dining-room and up the hall; they heard the sagging creak of the stair-rail as his body swung against it.
“He’s coming!” she whispered.
“He’s coming!
Lock the door, son!”
The boy locked the door.
“Are you there?” Gant roared, pounding the flimsy door heavily with his great fist.
“Miss Eliza: are you there?” howling at her the ironical title by which he addressed her at moments like this.
And he screamed a sermon of profanity and woven invective:—
“Little did I reck,” he began, getting at once into the swing of preposterous rhetoric which he used half furiously, half comically, “little did I reck the day I first saw her eighteen bitter years ago, when she came wriggling around the corner at me like a snake on her belly —[a stock epithet which from repetition was now heart-balm to him]— little did I reck that — that — that it would come to this,” he finished lamely.
He waited quietly, in the heavy silence, for some answer, knowing that she lay in her white-faced calm behind the door, and filled with the old choking fury because he knew she would not answer.
“Are you there?
I say, are you there, woman?” he howled, barking his big knuckles in a furious bombardment.
There was nothing but the white living silence.
“Ah me! Ah me!” he sighed with strong self-pity, then burst into forced snuffling sobs, which furnished a running accompaniment to his denunciation.
“Merciful God!” he wept, “it’s fearful, it’s awful, it’s croo-el.
What have I ever done that God should punish me like this in my old age?”
There was no answer.
“Cynthia!
Cynthia!” he howled suddenly, invoking the memory of his first wife, the gaunt tubercular spinstress whose life, it was said, his conduct had done nothing to prolong, but whom he was fond of supplicating now, realizing the hurt, the anger he caused to Eliza by doing so.
“Cynthia!
O Cynthia!
Look down upon me in my hour of need!
Give me succour!
Give me aid!
Protect me against this fiend out of Hell!”